NBC leaves Olympics viewers outraged but satisfied.

NBC's coverage of the London Olympics Closing Ceremony left at least two groups of viewers outraged.

  The first group ran afoul of NBC's online efforts - NBC streamed the Closing Ceremony live (using a generic English language feed), but made the decision to delay its television coverage to US prime time, filling the afternoon broadcast feed with Olympic replays and commentary.  Purists wondered why they didn't go ahead and put the live Ceremonies on the main NBC television feed, and then do a replay (or highlights of the Olympics show) in prime time.
  It was a business decision, of course, but one that led directly to the second, much more significant problem.  NBC apparently thought that its Olympics audience would be a great place to preview a new Fall sitcom about veterinarians.  Originally set to come on after the closing ceremonies, NBC pulled a "Heidi" by deciding to interrupt the closing ceremonies to keep "Animal Practice" in its scheduled time slot.  In doing so, they cut out a number of performances.

The Twitter-sphere exploded, with “#NBCfail” and “#closingceremonies” trending worldwide, after NBC cut out performances by Ray Davies, Kate Bush, The Who and the Muse in favor of a commercial-free airing of “Animal Practice.”

“I still don’t understand, it’s a tape delay, so can’t you do the math in advance? Why do you need to cut off the closing ceremony? #nbcfail,” wrote Raj Sarkar on Twitter.

A spokesman for NBC, in acknowledging earlier social media complaints, said that NBC was paying attention - while still managing to blame viewers.

“Some of the criticism I think was fair and we took note of it and learned from it,” Lazarus said, “but I think in general a lot of it came from people who weren’t fully aware of all of the things we were doing.”

While there were some issues with the tape delays, the at times interminable chatty hosts and feel-good stories, and the choices of what events to cover on which channel, NBC's ratings, online and on TV, surpassed those of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and a Pew study reported that about three-quarters of Americans watching the Olympics this year were generally satisfied with the TV coverage.

In any case, 2016 should be better - Rio is closer in time.  And if NBC continues this year's trend of streaming all events, more of us will be able to control what we end up watching through our selection of which streaming feeds to send to our screens, rather than  relying on NBC's sometimes problematic choices.
 
 Sources -  NBC enrages Olympics viewers one last time,  Poynter
Viewers outraged after NBC cuts away from Olympics closing ceremony, World Sport News (from CNN)